A blog about engagement and marketing

Dr. Pepper Impresses

Dr. Pepper makes an offer. It will give every America a Dr. Pepper is Guns N’ Roses releases it’s new album called Chinese Democracy in the year 2008.
It’s a cool offer. So cool in fact, that the write up of the press release got over 2500+ Diggs (and still growing), a rarity on Digg for press releases.

Admittedly the giving away of 300+ million cans of Dr. Pepper is interesting. but not interesting enough to merit a showing on the home page. And I think because, they want to let this promotion build speed. It’s a long promotion, and I think it will play out over time. Here’s why: They started a bloglines blog, the Dr. Pepper people did. It’s called Chinese Democracy When — meaning they want the album Chinese Democracy to be released now.

It’s a blog that is simply about the promotion. But I think you should see something first. This was the first blog post.

Note the date. March 4th. The promotion began much later in March. Here’s the next blog post announcing the promotion:

Now this is news. But it’s not a conversation starter. Thus, it only has 15 comments. But this piece of news brought people to the site to see the first blog post. And that’s a conversation started. Indeed, the first comment came on March 25th. In less than a week, 70 people have engaged with Dr. Pepper.

And there’s no real cost to the brand. If people disagree with the brands assessment that Axl Rose is the greatest front man ever, it doesn’t matter. Partly becauseof the free Dr. Pepper, but mostly because this is just the kind of inane conversations that happen all over the web on social networks. I’ll bet most people who think there is such a thing as the greatest front man ever will at some point weigh in here. And they’ll be jumping into a conversation that was begun by a brand.

There’s no real metric to measure what that will mean, but they might subscribe to the RSS feed. And if they do, Dr. Pepper can keep right on telling them that a free Dr. Pepper is only months away.